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Why just blocking Meta's Threads won't be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The same way they do on Facebook and Instagram. By using the vast amount of data they have already collected.
So really, the headline, according to you should be "only not writing anything on the public web will be enough to protect your privacy". You argument has nothing specifically to do with the Fediverse or Threads federating.
I think the point is that we should all agree to limit Facebook’s access to our data.
Federating helps them do shitty things and that seems bad.
Yes, I agree about Facebook. But over exaggerating the threat to privacy that federation poses isn’t the way to do it, in my opinion. Instead there should be a clear, well-informed and accurate risk assessment
Okay but his risk was still real.
Facebook will aggregate your online data and deanonymize things you didn’t want exposed.
Privacy matters and every inch is worth fighting for at this point because we’ve lost so much.
Sure, but that has nothing specifically to do about Federation with Threads.
Yes…. It does… threads is owned by Facebook.
The suggestion in the article is that Facebook and Threads have some special way of gettimg information about you from the fediverse. From what I can tell that's not true. Your exposure is the same here, as it would be posting anywhere on the public internet - on Reddit, for example.
For sure!! The data they can get from federation isn’t a ton more than from scraping sites.
But scraping sites is HARD and we’re better off NOT making it easier for them.
Facebook is also likely to put effort into rebuilding existing communities on their federated version of the sites encouraging users to go there. They’ll make it really attractive.
And then they get MORE data because they will be able to see and aggregate which communities you look at and browse. They can’t get that without federation.
And that entirely ignores the “embrace extend extinguish” angle that I assure you is coming.
Because they’re bound to their stockholders to always produce the most profit, and letting people browse “other” services doesn’t play well with that.
That's just fear mongering based on extremely contrived examples. It also has nothing to do with federation, it is trivial for any actor, whatever their resources, to access all the information in the fediverse.
Don't be a boomer. Leverage security in public. Have alts and personas. Stay focused instead of falling for corporate astroturfing that tries to decredibilize new initiatives.
That’s just factually incorrect. Only the servers themselves know which articles I’m reading. Upvotes and comments are public, but that’s not ALL data.
It’s cute that you consider it fear mongering , but you’re not actually making any argument outside of an attempt at a personal argument and calling me a boomer.
I’m sure it feels silly to value privacy, because we haven’t been watching what they’re doing. Then suddenly an authoritarian gets power and you’re being jailed because Facebook sold you out to the authorities. You’re going to call that fear mongering too, except that it’s happening today with abortions.
But you won’t be interested in that because your health/life isn’t the one that’s being put at risk.
No no let's be clear about the threat model we are discussing here : the possibility for Meta to de-anonymize me in a way that might hurt me, although i don't have accounts on Meta properties. That is a pipe dream. Even the example on the top of the article has nothing to do with federation it's just about a Meta property communicating your data to another Meta property which, no shit, Sherlock.
There is no technical proof that our identities on the fediverse are in danger because of Threads. Litterally zero. There is barely any functioning threat model, and the authors of this one admit readily, in the abstract of the paper, that these models would apply to any bad actor. They just take Threads as a notorious example.
Now, is Lemmy particularly subject to paranoid thinking, or are some trolls shilling on Lemmy to decredibilize the solution, i don't know. But this is all wild speculation.
You might not have any meta accounts but that’s not the norm.
Giving meta access to cross pollenate their data is a terrible idea, that’s the entire problem with meta and Google, they have too much information on us to the point they can identify us without the accounts. Their ad tracking in the background of other sites gives them information that you gave a third party.
The threat model is the same as Cambridge analytica, selling “manipulation” and everyone thinks they’re above it, they aren’t. You aren’t.
So yes, the threat models apply to any bad actor, you’re right, but it’s the larger and more coordinated ones that pose the bigger threats here.
A bad actor with access to only Lemmy has more limited data and options for threats.
That that ignores the fact that Facebook/meta is going to use Microsoft’s “EEE” model to push traffic to their own version. Google is doing it today with chrome.
What's disheartening to me in this kind of conversation is that when you boil it down to specifics it becomes super vague. "Cross pollenating data", well i'm a data engineer and i have no idea what that means. "Selling manipulation" is a threat model ? "Embrace Extend Extinguish" ? I'm sorry but that's word salad to me. If we take those arguments far enough they just become "yeah well bad people can do bad things to you on the internet" and while true, this is entirely irrelevant to the fediverse conversation.
The OP blog article does not support the positions you see every day in Lemmy comments such as yours. All he's saying of tangible value is that if Meta federates then your account & instance names will be potentially visible by people on Threads. That is not a credible threat to your privacy in the fediverse - that is just the system of federated social networks working as intended.
Whatever attack vector there is against you already existed before the fediverse or Threads. And Lemmy was never designed or marketed as adequate protection for people who need full-stack privacy.
There’s absolutely new threat vectors.
Let’s get specific, since you claim to work in analytics.
If I can link your lemmy account to a Facebook account, then I can uniquely identify you.
Any posted links from the meta federation that open in a browser can use standard fingerprinting to identify you. That still exists today, but given I served your ip the lemmy-article and you then clicked the link in it, I can now join the two by ip alone. Now there could be multiple people browsing at your house, so this will have to be a time series and probability, but the correlation will eventually be strong enough to say with reasonable certainty. This works especially well if I put something like “google amp” or a url shortened in the middle of the links, because then I don’t need to have my advertising/tracking code on the website. Without the federation I can’t link it to an account and I can’t see your browsing history on pages that my “analytics code” isn’t on.
There’s your netsec threat vector.
From the social perspective, the threat vector is exactly the same as Cambridge analytica. I notice that you as a unique user fit pattern x and I start tailoring the links you see and don’t see based on what I want to change about you. Now it’s not AS effective because the real effectiveness there was removing articles that disprove some of my bullshit. Because I’m just a node in the federation, I can’t prevent other nodes from showing you conflicting info.
Selling manipulation is a social threat vector, but if you want netsec, you now have both.
EEE becomes important because it increases effectiveness and value of the manipulation that I sell.
Then suddenly you wake up, everyone has voted for brexit or some orange scammer against their own self interest. If you work with big data, then you know that you can change a lot of individual points in small nearly imperceptible ways (to that specific data) that can make huge changes to the dataset as a whole.